American Madness

Apparently, eating honey doesn’t do shit for allergies. Eating pollen might help.

ABC News:
Allergy Myths Revealed
(Courtesy of Matt Friedlander)

You may recall that the location formerly known as Chickpea, a falafel house off of St. Mark’s Place, was holding a contest to name their restaurant.

Well the winner was announced yesterday. They emailed all contestants that they will now be Kosher Village!

Yeah, I thought that was a pretty lousy name as well and decided to respond to the email and let them know. What happened when I hit respond was that I noticed that the email was addressed not to a ghost list but, rather, contained the email addresses of all the other contest participants. (Ed: The list, by a quick count, appears to contain 3,000 email addresses.) (more…)

Have you grown tired of the status quo? Do you dream of having a private island of your own? Maybe a special little place to start your own cult? Just need a place to get away from it all?

Well, PrivateIslandsOnline is just the site for you, search through hundreds of private islands to buy and call your own.

I know, this sounds totally ridiculous. In fact, I was a hater when I first read about the site. I figured it was just another site for the uber-rich to throw away their money buying things that us pleebs could only ever dream of. Then I actually clicked around the site a bit.

This is going to sound strange, but PrivateIslandsOnline has a wide range of islands available in almost anyone’s price range. Yes, some islands, especially the gorgeous tropical ones are in the millions and tens of millions, but you can pick up a nice 170 acres in Tennessee for about the cost of a 1 bedroom apartment in New York City. Or there are 20 acres in Grenada for $6.5 million.

They even have listings of private islands for rent if buying isn’t your thing.

Pretty interesting stuff (and maybe something to consider for your next vacation… Though you may want to have some knowledge of how to steer a boat). So what are you waiting for? Go and start that new country you have always wanted or become the Bond villain you always dreamed of being.

The headline says it all for this one.

Sometimes I love having a blog, my friends email me a ton of stories, some worth posting, some not so much, some so random that I really have no other choice but to post*.

A Roman-Catholic priest in Brazil was trying to set a world record, you’d think it would be like holiest man or most confessions heard in a day or something, but no, he wanted to break the record for longest time in the air by way of party balloons (the helium variety of course). This wasn’t his first time either, on January 13th, he had done the same thing. At the time he had spent 4 hours in the air. You’d think that this is so random he would be competing against his own record right? Nope apparently the record holder was aloft for 19 hours (I would tell you who that was but it isn’t the easiest thing to find on the internet) so he had quite aways to go. (more…)

From today’s New York Times:

The gross domestic product grew at a 0.6 percent annual rate in the first quarter, the Commerce Department said on Wednesday, holding steady from the last three months of 2007.

The expansion, however slim, came as something of a relief to Wall Street, which had been bracing for a contraction. Many analysts have labeled the current downturn a recession, but the economy appears so far to have avoided the informal definition of two consecutive quarters of contraction.

No matter how much the FT and the Economist think they can editorially will this nation into recession, the numbers betray slowing growth, not a recession. At this point, given the 0.6% growth in GDP in the first quarter, the earliest the U.S. economy could actually hit “recession” would be September 30, 2008.

Well not really, I just want to do my part to increase our share of Miley Cyrus related search traffic. We here at American Madness are of course huge Hannah Montana fans and we just want to do our part to support her and Miley. (What?! They’re the same person…well if it isn’t one thing, it’s another…)

I also wanted an excuse to post this ridiculous photo of Miley Cyrus I came across. Actually, it isn’t a Miley Cyrus photograph taken by Annie Lebowitz. Come to think of it, it isn’t even a Miley Cyrus photo.

But it is ridiculous.

So the proper title of this post would perhaps be: A Ridiculous Photo I Came Across That Has Nothing To Do With Miley Cyrus or Hannah Montana or Miley Cyrus Playing Hannah Montana on Television Which Isn’t Real.

By Aneta Kowalczyk via Matthew Haggerty

Call it web 2.0 or whatever, but we are in a very exciting time for Internet usefulness. In just the last month, a slew of new applications have popped up that show the promise of the internet to make life more entertaining.

Muxtape, while operating with dubious legality, is a very simple way to share music with friends. WilliamsburgEats is pure genius: completely local restaurant links with a huge Google map providing the base functionality (the model can be ported anywhere). Now we have BeerMenus, which could have a profound affect on the pricing of NY beers, since it allows for drinkers to seek out specific beers based on price (not its core function, but a very useful benefit of correlating all NYC bars with the beers they serve).

What’s next:
HottestWaitress.com? WineMenus.com? CheapestGas.com?

The real revolution won’t happen until we get MostSuedDoctors.com, or PharmaPrices.com, ConvictionRateByJudge.com. Or what if someone were to challenge U.S News simply by reprocessing their data into an actual accounting of the best colleges? (In other words, kill that absurd category they have that judges colleges by how they are perceived and just judge their grad rates, student teacher ratio, and other meaningful stats).

Google is providing a lot of the pipes for all this, but also allows for inefficiencies that it may someday remove: if Google’s restaurant listings didn’t suck, we’d have no need for WilliamsburgEats, but Google, for some unfathomable reason, is terrible at listing all nearby restaurants.

But we can thank Google for the speed with which we can aggregate data. We then have PHP to thank for easy database access. And web design has gone functional, thank God. Flash is dead! Long live the useful!

Today in Gawker:

This email has been floating around for a week or so, but we’re going to run it as a public service. It was first circulated by a PR guy as a classic “How Not To Pitch A Reporter” lesson.

In this case, the email pitch below was sent to a hedge fund reporter. That is to say, a professional journalist who spends his days chronicling the ins and outs of the secretive high finance world. So one might have expected that a PR firm would cull its email blast list just a bit before it went to work on behalf of its “Long Island based car shop” client.

But no! Pitches like this are why reporters hate PR people. CAN YOU GUESS WHICH PR AGENCY THIS CAME FROM? The full pitch (to, again, a hedge fund reporter), and the stunning reveal of the agency’s identity, after the jump.

I’ll give you 5 guesses…

As I mentioned in the AM review for A Casa Fox, they are currently still B.Y.O.B. as they wait for their liquor license.

Since we were there for brunch, this could have quickly turned into a travesty had we not been prepared. Armed with an unopened bottle of ultra-premium vodka we were rescued from having to have a BloodyMary-less brunch.

Now before anyone begins to lecture me, I am aware that mixing really good vodka into something like a Bloody Mary could be considered sacrilege, like taking a fine fillet mignon and grounding it into hamburger meat, though in either case you are either drinking a really nice Bloody Mary or eating a really fine burger.

The very first thing you are going to notice about U’Luvka vodka is its bottle design, a unique undulating neck with a bulb at the bottom that they say has a “distinctive seductively curvy shape.” I’d say it is a bit more sperm-like in shape. A cork replaces the usual screw cap and has a neat little design running around it visible even when capped. (more…)